An ocean away from the Second Amendment, French officials have grabbed a collection of guns from a French actor who played gangster roles in his heyday.
Police took 72 firearms from the residence of Alain Delon, who doesn’t have a permit for any of them, prosecutors said on Tuesday, according to the U.K.’s Guardian.
Delon, 88, also had 3,000 rounds of ammunition at his home in rural Douchy-Montcorbon, about 84 miles south of Paris. The property is complete with a shooting range.
Delon “has no authorization that would allow him to own a firearm,” local prosecutor Jean-Cédric Gaux said.
Delon played a gunman in films such as “Boraslin” and “The Samurai.”
The actor suffered a stroke in 2019, which was the same year as his appearance when he received an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. In September 2021, he attended the Paris funeral of actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.
According to the U.K. Telegraph, Anouchka Delon publicly commented about her father’s guns in a recent interview.
🔴 Police raid on Alain Delon’s property comes after his daughter claims her brothers walk around the family mansion believing they are “in the Wild West”
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) February 28, 2024
Will the Second Amendment survive in America?
She said her brothers “walk around the house armed” at the mansion, as if they were “in the Wild West”.
In January, Deadline reported that the actor was placed under legal protection amid fights by his children over his care.
“He doesn’t speak much, it tires him or it annoys him when we make him repeat, because his voice is no longer always clear, or audible,” Anthony Delon told Paris Match, according to the U.K. Independent.
In 2022, Republican Sen. Mike Carpo of Idaho noted that so-called “red flag laws” that support the type of confiscation that happened in France to Delon should be resisted as an abridgment of Second Amendment rights.
“Congress should not incentivize states to establish red flag programs in violation of Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” he wrote.
“As demonstrated in some states with red flag laws, states can use red flag laws to deny access to firearms without requiring adjudication in a court of law that a person is an imminent danger to self or others. An individual does not need a criminal record or a history of mental illness to lose their firearms,” he wrote.
Crapo noted that elderly Americans came within a whisker of being deprived of their gun rights.
“During the Obama Administration, the Social Security Administration (SSA) also sought, via regulation, to declare Americans who need assistance managing their benefits as mentally defective and subject to having their Second Amendment rights revoked,” he wrote.
“Entering millions of seniors into a system designed to prevent the sale of guns to bad actors is not the solution to stopping violence in society. Fortunately, in 2017, Congress passed and President Trump signed a resolution that nullified the regulation. I was an original co-sponsor of the Senate version of the resolution,” he wrote.
